The city of Ljubljana is adapting its cultural infrastructure to the new times. Musica Ljubljana will be built close to Bavarski dvor Square and will complement the old Opera Theatre, a Neo-Renaissance work dating from 1892.

The fall of totalitarianism, the disintegration of former Yugoslavia and its entry into the European Union, the Schengen Area and the Euro zone have stimulated the Slovenian economy. Its young capital, Ljubljana, is in need of new buildings on par with its renewed political and economic pulse.

This is a project on the edge of Ljubljana city centre, near the river bank, comprising of 56 dwelling units for students of Ljubljana University.

Located next to a dual carriageway, between a sports ground and some disused sheds, the student housing is protected from the traffic by a wooded garden. A symmetric layout leaves no doubt as to the program organization: common rooms on the ground floor and bedrooms aligned in two pairs of modules, with the communication nuclei in the centre of each. The void between the two modules is occupied by courtyard, around which the common activities take place.
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The Izola social dwellings form part of group of low cost projects planned by Ofis between 2003 and 2008. This shares, apart from a low budget, some common materials, such as laminated resin panel and the rendering, the modularization of the façade by employing several alternate patterns and the bar-shaped layout with access to the dwellings through central corridors.
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This project can only be understood by taking the numbers into account: 650 subsidized dwellings in one of the Ljubljana’s urban voids; 4 long strips aligned in a plot demanding compactness; a height of ground floor plus five storeys, with dwellings on each floor; a density of approximately 300 dwellings/ ha and a construction cost of no more than €700/m².
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The Maths faculty isn't as might first appear an epidermic exercise yet in fact a work of insertion. Located in one of the university areas of Liubliana, the programme is built upon a previous two-storey building not belonging to the faculty, such that the existing building and the new one have to remain separate, even though they share the same space.
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The state of housing after three years is always an unknown factor or rather the acid test for the authors. On one of the days spent in Ljubljana we decided to visit the Polje housing, which is a group of 78 subsidized units located in the outskirts, on the border between the consolidated city and the country.
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As Slovenia became part of the European Union in 2004, it was required to build a series of new institutional public service buildings, including this congress centre in Brdo. This building originates in a need for a building to hold representative acts during its E.U. Presedency. The entire project was designed and built in under two years. There are, however, no traces of this haste on the building. This is the result of an exquisite building control that undergo all buildings by this studio, started by Matja Bevk (Ljubljana, 1972) and Vasa Perovic (Belgrade, 1965) in 1997.
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From a distance, you squint and what you can make out of Slovenia is the beacon of Joze Plecnik’s work and a few sparks that could be his great-grandchildren. Once you are there, in this young country of two million inhabitants, 20,000 square kilometres and GDP per capita similar to Spain's (Wikipedia dixit), the panorama begins to define itself and the proportions of the first impression start to readjust.
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